Slowly working away

Science and religion are two windows that people look through, trying to understand the big universe outside, trying to understand why we are here. The two windows give different views, but both look out at the same universe. Both views are one-sided, neither is complete. Both leave out essential features of the real world. And both are worthy of respect. Freeman Dyson

Not really; not really; not exactly; not in the sense implied; not really; not at all.

The Centre also sponsors regional conferences to encourage new networks for examining connections between theology and the sciences; and through its international workshops it enhances the quality of courses on science and religion that are taught worldwide.

What connections between theology and the sciences? What connections are there? None that I know of. What connections could there be?

As for courses on science and religion, the whole idea of such courses is mostly the child of the Templeton Foundation, fostered through satellite outfits like the Ian Ramsey Centre, so that Templeton “Fellows” can fan out and talk about science’n’religion as if they went together like salt’n’pepper.

29 Responses to “Slowly working away”

I have always frowned on Dyson’s stealth admiration for religion, but it hasn’t been as obvious as in your quote. What aspect of the “real world” does science leave out and religion encompass? Note, he says real world—not an imaginary one.

Religion looks at (not through) a bunch of different drawings of windows crayoned on the wall. They don’t offer a view of anything but the psychology of the people (usually men) who wielded the crayons.

And to have more fun with the Two Windows metaphor, the theists, not merely content to gaze at their own crayoned windows, have spent a lot of energy over the years trying to both erase the other drawings of windows and to pint over or brick up the window of science.

I’m not sure how we could modify that metaphor to reflect the fact that science works whereas religion doesn’t. A window we look out from seems too passive an image to capture science, if only because it misses the most important way to do science, the experiment.

That epigraph is embarrassing. Religion isn’t trying to understand anything. It says it does understand…everything. The Vatican isn’t making some objective, open-minded attempt to comprehend the cosmos. Rather, it says it knows exactly what the universe is all about, and it lays it out by fiat.

I wasn’t meaning that science should or would tell religion to STFU; that’s just my own idea of what religions role in any dialogue should be.

Jose;

Maybe science goes out through the door to have a closer look and religion sits far enough away from the door so as not to see it. I dunno; there’s only so far a metaphor can take you before it falls to the ground in tiny smoldering pieces. It was fun while it lasted…

…not Bruce, don’t worry, I actually agree with your point, and was just doing a lighthearted metaphor-upsmanship thing, about what’s actually a different aspect of the situation. (It’s not that it’s not a stream of bat’s piss, but it is also a golden shaft, illuminating the darkness. It’s all about illuminating the darkness, or dimness, or something.)

I can offer a specific contribution that religion makes to science. Without religion, people would only debate about topics that are not well resolved by the available evidence. In other words, all the debates would be really HARD. At the end of a day of real work struggling with real questions, it must be nice to come home and have religion toss you a few softballs to slam out of the park. Dr. Coyne would be a great example. Work time means rolling up his sleeves and working out the genetic mechanisms of speciation; off time means dealing with folks who won’t even accept common ancestry.

The most important parts of religion have nothing to do with windows, with ‘understanding why we are here’ or with sweetly ineffable private experiences; instead, they have to do with social unity, stability and survival and the authoratitive handing down of traditions and learning – of a kind (and in some tribal societies often of a useful kind: the initiation rites for Australian aboriginal boys, for example, involve the often painful inculcation of vast amounts of geographical information, often in the forms of myths, that the boys have to memorise and that will allow them to move through vast tracts of land and know where they are and where they are going.) That is why, as Walter Burkert writes, ‘Ancient religions normally gravitate to the dominating classes and the representatives of power’ – which is what of course Christianity did. What I find alarming about the sentimental and ignorant little epigraph from Freeman Dyson is that it shows that those academics in charge at the Ian Ramsey Centre have made no effort to think seriously about their ostensible subject or to acquaint themselves with what the best scholars of religion have said and are saying; or they are purposely ignoring the work of Durkheim, Mauss, Evans-Pritchard, Boyer and others in order to perpetrate what amounts to a deception.

@14 — Yes, I’d like to know what is “worthy“ of respect and what is not. If everything is worthy of respect, then the statement is meaningless. If only certain things are worthy of respect, well then what method do we use to determine what we should respect? According to my method, what makes me respect science also makes me not respect religion.

Oh dear, Dyson again. Climate “skeptic”, you know, and quite out of touch. A shame, really, as he’s terribly smart, but no more skeptical (in the modern sense) than Newton.

On a secondary note, am I still the only one bothered that Synthese published an ID article months before this latest hullabaloo? I mean, after a journal publishes a “scientific proof” of God, by a “truther”, no less, why be surprised about a pro-ID disclaimer?

I noticed that the IRC was involved in the Oxford Centre for Science of the Mind (OXCSOM), run by Susan Greenfield, also funded by Templeton. Anyone know what happened to that? It seems to have disappeared, which makes one wonder. Perhaps entirely innocent – maybe its name changed.

It’s worth looking up Ian Ramsey on the internet. He was a Christian from childhood, became a bishop and a professor of divinity. Out of his own interest in the relationship between theology and science (there really isn’t one, I know, but never mind), he had this Centre set up at Oxford University in 1985 specifically to look into that relationship. Those who man the place, such as Trigg, are all obviously committed Christians whose interest is not truth but apologetics, which is to say defending the ‘truths’ of religion – which is to say, Christianity – against all comers. Yes, Templeton funded this farce, but whether they had funded it or not, Trigg’s ‘findings’ were a foregone conclusion. That is what the Centre is there for. So perhaps Templeton shouldn’t be seen as much of an influence on this ‘study’; it merely scattered its largesse on fertile ground.

Trouble arises when either science or religion claims universal jurisdiction, when either religious or scientific dogma claims to be infallible. Religious creationists and scientific materialists are equally dogmatic and insensitive. By their arrogance they bring both science and religion into disrepute. The media exaggerate their numbers and importance. The media rarely mention the fact that the great majority of religious people belong to moderate denominations that treat science with respect, or the fact that the great majority of scientists treat religion with respect so long as religion does not claim jurisdiction over scientific questions.

While Dyson is a practising christian and somewhat given to accommodationismn, I hardly think the whole statement is the ringing endorsement that the Ian Ramsey centre is trying to pretend that it is. Rather it’s a restatement of NOMA – ho, hum!

PS: I really think we need to stop asserting that a person’s views on climate change automatically validate or invalidate his/her views on every other possible subject.

In a bizarre experiment, academics at The Oxford Centre For Science Of The Mind ‘tortured’ 12 Roman Catholics and 12 atheists with electric shocks as they studied a painting of the Virgin Mary.

They found that the Catholics seemed to be able to block out much of the pain.

Ergo, Jebus!

The findings were welcomed by the Anglican Bishop of Durham, the Rt Rev Tom Wright, who said: ‘The practice of faith should, and in many cases does, alter the person you are. ‘It can affect the patterns of your brain and your emotions. So it comes as no surprise to me that this experiment has reached such conclusions.’

The practice of drug abuse can too, but I’m not about to recommend it. So maybe this sort of research backfired, and it didn’t quite reach the parts that Templeton wanted. Interesting one for the ethicists; I might be able to argue a case for the experiment on utilitarian grounds, but I’m not so sure about one on deontological grounds.

Psychologist Miguel Farias, one of the team, admitted that a similar effect may be produced by non-believers if a sufficiently powerful image was used. He said: ‘We would need to find a picture of someone they feel very positive towards, such as a mother or father.’

What was extraordinary to me was that the presenter (John Humphries) didn’t ask Greenfield about it (poor research, no doubt). OXCOM was set up to investigate, “how belief physically affects our brains, how religious faith affects experiences such as pain, whether there is a detectable physical difference in the brain between religious and secular faith, and ultimately how the collection of physical matter making up our brains can generate consciousness.” Consequently, if the funding agency is pro-religious, there is a clear possibility for a conflict of interest.

It would be good to hear what the other research showed. Or maybe they blew all the cash on inflicting pain on experimental subjects.

Here’s another way of putting the failure of science/religion compatibility. You have all these foundations, institutes, books, and various gatherings to explain, study, discuss the ways that science and religion are compatible. OK, what have they found? What methods are used, and what are the results of the study?

All of these efforts are supposedly designed to give us knowledge, aren’t they, to resolve a problem? Isn’t the problem they are dedicated to resolve the incompatibility of science and religion? IOW the incompatibilty can’t be fixed just by saying it’s not there, that it’s all a mistake, otherwise what are these efforts for? What is it we are supposed to learn? And where/when is the actual study/effort taking place?

I reject the idea that science/religion conflict is jurisdictional. The problem is that religion has no proper grounds for jurisdiction over anything. Even it’s own history and interpretation of the ideas religion expresses has been excellently elucidated by nonbelievers. It doesn’t take any religion at all to understand anything objectively, even including religion itself. So where is the jurisdiction? What territory do theists rule over? I say they don’t have exclusive access even to their own fantasies.

Didn’t Freeman Dyson get a Templeton award of some sort many years ago? [Ah, Wikipedia lists him as receiving a Templeton Prize in 2000.] He’s a brilliant mathematician/physicist but (a) somehow he clings to religion and makes very silly claims about the compatibility of science and religion and (b) he makes fantastic claims about “artificial trees” which suck CO2 out of the air and thus save us from the CO2 induced global warming. Many chemists have spent many years thinking about CO2 and what can be done with it and I am fairly confident in saying the chemical is understood well enough that we won’t have any of Dyson’s magic artificial trees.

The Templeton Foundation: conflating science and religion since 1987 (and of course John Templeton was doing the same thing single-handedly since about 1970).

PS: I really think we need to stop asserting that a person’s views on climate change automatically validate or invalidate his/her views on every other possible subject.

Oh? Who is asserting that, and thus needs to stop? I suppose I’m the only other one here who mentioned it, and I’ve actually used his work in quantum mechanics before, so I feel pretty confident that I’m not trying to invalidate his views “on every other possible subject”.

Personally, I brought up the climate thing, not as a dismissal by itself, but as relating to his general out-of-touchness with some of the things he likes to talk about. And it’s not just his conclusions that bother me, but the poor quality and lack of coherent organization to his reasoning. He defends that view badly.

Science and religion are two windows that people look through, trying to understand the big universe outside, trying to understand why we are here. The two windows give different views, but both look out at the same universe. Both views are one-sided, neither is complete. Both leave out essential features of the real world. And both are worthy of respect.

“The big universe outside”!? Outside what? And in what way does religion offer a window onto that big universe? This is simply confused. It is clear that religion does not offer a window at all. Not one religious person can provide any evidence for the truth of religious beliefs. Ernie Keller is absolutely right here. Until the religious can provide reasonable support for their beliefs, the non-religious have the same access to religious fantasy as the religious.

So it is simply pointless to talk about windows onto the big universe. The only windows we have are methods for showing things to be either reasonably thought to be true or not. Religious folk might be adept at generating psychic experiences by the use of ritual, music, chanting, meditation, or what have you. But experience alone doesn’t provide a window onto a universe. If it did, we couldn’t even begin to speak of hallucinations, since hallucinations are experiences too. There has to be some error theory, and religions simply can’t provide one. And, until they do, trying to relate science and religion is a lost cause. As Ophelia asks, What connexion could there be?

Regarding the pain research (cited by Mark Jones) which claims to show that religious people are “able to down-regulate the perceived intensity of a noxious stimulation,” by looking at a religious picture, though not while looking at a non-religious picture, the conclusion clearly can only be that, if what the experimental subject is asked to look at has some emotional salience for them it will have an effect on their experience of pain. Had pcitures that were emotionally salient had been provided to non-religious subjects, the likelihood is that they also could have “down-regulated” the perceived intensity of pain. The experiment (so heavily funded by the Templeton Foundation) has a serious design flaw. That’s the problem if you think you are looking through a window, and all you are staring at is a black wall on which you are projecting your delusions.

The only thing I know of him doing is showing the equivalence of the Feynmann and the Tomonaga-Schwinger approaches to QWD (“The Holy Ghost Incomprehensible”), but aside from that I only ever hear of science-fiction: Diamond-dropping trees to get rid of CO_2_ and structures in space to collect all the output of a star.